Marine is remembered as 'jokester' and 'angel'

Tom CoombeOf The Morning Call

Joshua Klinger joined the Marines to serve his country, but also to prove to himself that he could do it.

He was "the goof-off, the jokester," who liked to keep busy. He didn't talk much, but when he did, it would make his brother and sister crack up. He was a hero to his younger brother and his 8- year-old cousin, who wrote a school essay saying as much. He played the piano and taught himself the guitar.

His sister called him the family's "angel," watching over the family.

All of those memories came flooding out of Klinger's family members in Williams Township as they struggled Wednesday with the news that their son, their brother, a 21-year-old Wilson Area High School graduate, was killed by shrapnel from a roadside bomb in Iraq. The family said the attack happened Tuesday at 1:07 a.m. Iraqi time, or 5:07 p.m. Monday locally.

According to a Defense Department statement issued Wednesday afternoon, Klinger, a private first class, died "as a result of an explosion from an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations against enemy forces near Fallujah, Iraq."

Klinger joined the Marines in May 2004. He shipped out for Iraq on March 11, said his mother, Sharon Klinger. According to the Department of Defense release, he was a member of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Klinger was scheduled to come home in October.

"He tried to comfort me," his mother said Wednesday, sitting with her husband, children, and mother-in-law in the family's living room. "He said it was only seven months."

On Wednesday afternoon, cars covered part of the lawn at the Klinger house. . Nervous snatches of conversation filled the other rooms as Joshua Klinger's immediate family talked about him.

"He had to be doing something," said Philip Klinger, Joshua's father. "He didn't like to just sit."

Busy as he was, Joshua Klinger liked to make people laugh, his father said. His mother recalled an Easter Sunday Communion service when Joshua brought two plastic Communion cups home from church, and wore them over his eyes like goggles.

"He never complained at all about what he had to go through [at boot camp]," she said. "He knew it was to build a better Marine."

It was difficult for her son to communicate with the family from Iraq, as his base had no Internet service or phone lines. Occasionally, the soldiers would have access to a cell phone, and Klinger and his fellow Marines would pass it around and call home. He told his family that conditions in Iraq were "terrible."

There was no sanitation, which meant flies were everywhere. Klinger asked his parents to send bug spray, moist towelettes and a spray deodorizer for socks. He asked them for candy and pens to give the Iraqi children.

Sharon Klinger, a teacher's assistant at the Colonial Intermediate Unit in Palmer Township, held a little drive at work, and collected pens, pencils, and jars of soap bubbles.

Sharon Klinger communicated through something called the moto- mail system, which allows military families to write e-mails to their loved ones. Those messages are then printed out, sealed in an envelope, and delivered like a letter. Sharon Klinger ended each message the same way: